Neil Abercrombie versus the birthers

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, December 30, 2010

Neil Abercrombie is ticked off. The newly elected governor of Hawaii knew Barack Obama's parents when they were all college students there, and the birther movement has caused steam to come out of his ears. Now that he's the governor, he wants to do something about it.

(The birthers, if you have been in a very pleasant cave somewhere, are a group of citizens who claim that Obama was born in Kenya and thus is not eligible to be president of the United States. There is little evidence to support this claim and a whole bunch of evidence against it, but that does not prevent the birthers from calling Obama a "usurper," among other things.)

"It's an insult to his mother and to his father," Abercrombie told Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times, "and I knew his mother and father; they were my friends, and I have an emotional interest in that. It's an emotional insult. It is disrespectful to the president; it is disrespectful to the office."

Abercrombie said he was going to work with the attorney general of Hawaii to release additional documentation of Obama's birth on Aug. 4, 1961, at Kapiolani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital. One point of contention with the birthers is that Obama has the "short form" of his birth certificate, and they have demanded to see the "long form." Why exactly that would prove anything is unclear; if one form can be forged, the other can be too. But it's a talking point.

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I understand and admire Abercrombie's motives, and I urge him not to get involved. The birther movement is a group of true believers, and evidence that does not support their beliefs will automatically be discredited. They can never be dissuaded, because they don't want to be dissuaded. They have staked their credibility on this notion of Obama the usurper; they have worked long and hard to prove the rightness of their cause. They have fought against long odds, the longest of them being that they're wrong.

Oh dear Gov. Abercrombie, they will depose you or attempt to depose you. They will disrupt your news conferences. They will make the governing of your state, with its large deficit, that much harder. And although they can never win, they will never be defeated.

Of course, there's a lot of right-wing resentment fueling this movement, and a fair amount of racism as well. "Additional documentation" is not a specific against racism.

The more the birther thing gets attention, the more the ignorant are drawn in. "Hmm, there must be something there." Abercrombie was particularly incensed when a bill was proposed in Congress to force presidential candidates to prove that they were born in the United States according to specific criteria. The idea that Mrs. Obama somehow slipped off to Kenya to have her child is, he says, "a demonological fantasy."

"My thought was, 'Wait a minute, why didn't you ask me, my friends in the national Congress, the House of Representatives?' They know me, they know that I was here, but they didn't even bother to have the courtesy to do that, which is disappointing to me, because it is very difficult for me not to conclude that bills like that are meant as a coded message that he is not really American. My thought is, rather than get into some kind of argument or play into that mentality, why not just simply try to authenticate this and let the facts speak for themselves?"

If the facts speaking for themselves were a real solution, it already would have happened. Retreat in peace, Governor; this is not a fight worth having.

In other news: Oakland author Jeff Greenwald is back with his unpredictable show "Strange Travel Suggestions," a semi-improvised collection of anecdotes, some funny and some serious, based on his experiences as an eccentric globe-trotter.

The premise is excellent: Onstage is a big wheel laden with many words and symbols; an audience member spins the wheel, and wherever it lands, Greenwald has a tale to tell based on the wheel's "suggestion." I saw the show in its last incarnation; it was great - although it is a virtual certainty that you will not see the same show I saw.

It's at the Berkeley Marsh, 2120 Allston Way, 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday, 5 p.m. Saturday from next Thursday through Jan. 22. Tickets may be obtained from the Marsh or from Brown Paper Tickets, (800) 838-3006.

As they say, never fight with a pig: You just get dirty, and the pig enjoys it.